Past the tipping point: The persistence of firefighting in product development

One of the most common syndromes in product development is firefighting, th e unplanned allocation of resources to fix problems discovered late in a pr oduct's development cycle. While it has been widely criticized in both the popular and scholarly literature, firefighting is a common occurrence in mo st product development organizations. Product development systems have a ti pping point. In models of infectious diseases, the tipping point represents the threshold of infectivity and susceptibility beyond which a disease bec omes an epidemic. Similarly, in product development systems there exists a threshold for problem-solving activity that, when crossed, causes firefight ing to spread rapidly from a few isolated projects to the entire developmen t system. The location of the tipping point, and therefore the susceptibili ty of the system to the firefighting phenomenon, is determined by resource utilization in steady state. Many of the current methods for aggregate reso urce planning are insufficient and managers wishing to avoid the firefighti ng dynamic must rethink their approach to managing multi-project developmen t environments.